Planned Development

Bulk operations

We know that a RESTful API is not always ideal for accessing and submitting data, especially those where larger volumes of data are involved such as during initial setup of an integration with Global FieldID, or automating the process of registering whole datasets of boundaries. We use a semi-manual process to manage this at present (please contact us for details).

We therefore plan to expose the facility we use internally to manage bulk operations to developers in a self-service API.

Expanding downloads

We plan to expand the range of data that can be downloaded in bulk, firstly to cover other types of boundary (not only the primary active boundary of each field) but also potentially custom downloads including private boundaries a user may have access to.

Vector tiles

The REST API's facility for downloading boundaries in GeoJSON format is intended for lookups of individual fields or small areas, and therefore applies an area limit.

Our user interface on the other hand shows boundaries in much wider areas, for which we index the boundary data as Mapbox vector tiles. Other users who may also wish to implement similar user interfaces could benefit from access to a similar functionality.

Boundary provenance

We plan to expose origin and taxonomy metadata, providing information about how boundaries were sourced and the method used to generate them.

Evented API

Internally we use an event-driven architecture to power the data ingestion and data preparation pipelines, as well as maintain an audit log. Exposing this functionality as an Async API would enable developers to create applications that are notified when fields are changed, maintain up-to-date copies of the FieldID data, and even implement their own read replica.